Making Futures is a research platform exploring contemporary craft and maker movements as ‘change agents’ within 21st century society. Convinced of the transformative potential of small-scale making and its capacity to contribute to new progressive futures, our purpose is to examine and promote the possibilities for maker economies built around contemporary craft, neo-artisanal design-to-make and related creative micro-entrepreneurs and movements.

The September 2017 edition operates under the rubric 'crafting a sustainable modernity: towards a maker aesthetics of production and consumption’. The idea here is of reclaiming a craft future within a contemporary moment that (contested definitions of the present notwithstanding) still takes place essentially within the ‘arc of Modernity’. Thus rather than seeing maker cultures as necessarily antithetical to contemporary Modernity, we want to see if we can frame emerging regimes of neo-artisanal production as part of a forward-looking attempt to reimagine a viable Modernity, one in which small-scale makers and micro-manufacturers try to innovate around technology, form, function, aesthetic meaning and social relevance – engaging in responsible (often place-based) market economics but striving to step outside the exploitative forms of commodification associated with the ‘disembedded’ global markets resonant of neo-liberalism.

The Call For Abstracts is now open and the closing date for receipt is 22nd May 2017. Building on the success of its four previous editions, Making Futures invites proposals for papers and presentations that address the main conference topic, thematic fields and workshops. Making Futures seeks to be broad and inclusive, and invites a diverse range of response, from artists, craftspeople, designer-makers, Fab Lab and maker-movement enthusiasts, campaigners and activists, curators, historians and theorists.